Friday, March 30, 2012

All's Fair at the Fair

Hopefully this video will allow for a visual connection to the topics we discussed in class.

Today in class we talked about the world's fairs and what they showed and how people perceived them. This cartoon made in 1938, a year before the 1939 world's fair in New york, which was one of the first world's fair that looked to the future instead of the past.

The poster advertising the 1939 world fair was looking towards the future and the possibilities rather than past inventions.

It starts out showing how fast the buildings to house the fairs were made since they were only supposed to be temporary. The building is very futuristic, containing both the sphere and the "wu-wu" shown in the poster above. All of the machines and mechanisms are futuristic and things that haven't yet been invented. The cartoon shows just how many people people would attend these events (although they probably didn't show up in trains that are like sardine cans). The people are all average looking, including the couple that we see arrive on horse and carriage. The image of the horse and carriage is meant to juxtapose all of the futuristic inventions, making people leave behind the past and go towards the future.

The 1939 fair was meant to celebrate the end of The Great Depression, so the cartoon shows all of these wondering thins being made with no regard to expense. For example, the furniture literally being push punched from the wood log and another wood log being made into a single clothes pin. But at the end of the cartoon, the old couple we first saw turn become a young and modern couple, abandoning their old ways, which was exactly what the 1939 world'd fair was meant to do.